Thanks you John Smart for reconnecting with David Brin. We are starting the Future Salon 2014 with a bang.

Scientist and Science Fiction Author David Brin will engage with us on Wednesday the 5th of February from 6pm onwards. Please Register!

David Brin is always interesting and mind expanding. In his book The Transparent Society from the late 90s he wrote about his vision of the comming surveillance state and our need to watch our watchers. The time is now to implement these checks and balances. Don't miss this Future Salon. In 2004 David Brin was Keynoting the Accelerating Change conference. Evelyn Rodrigues did a writup. #futuresalon

David Brinis a leading commentator and speaker on modern trends. His non-fiction book, The Transparent Society, won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. Published in 1999, the book details his vision of the coming surveillance state and the need to ‘watch the watchers’. His novels include Earth, The Postman (adapted to film and starring Kevin Costner) and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising and The Uplift War.

As I read to you at the AC2004 Jaron's Wikipedia entry starts with Jaron Lanier is an artist, musician, ...

Last Sunday you got a glimps of his brilliant mind. Come out this Sunday 14th 6pm to the Wheeler Auditorium in Berkely for an earfull of his muscianship. He will be playing with a couple of other excellent musicians.

Doug Engelbart was the most inspiriring speaker at the AC2004 conference. He is a true visionary and a real role model.

When he was young he set the principle for his life:

Let me design a professional goal which will maximize the contribution my career can have to mankind!

Weeks later his lifetime goal emerged:

As much as possible, to boost mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.

50 years later this goal is still driving him. Makes me think: Ahm, what was that again that is driving my life?

He compares us (the world) to a bus with little compartments (different countries). The bus is traveling over a bumpy road it is dark and the headlights are not working very good so the collective visibility into the future is not very good. From the compartments people are trying to steer the little bus. The problem is, that the bus is going at an ever faster pace (Accelerating Change). How he is asking can we collectively bring this bus back under control. (By the way he is looking for a cartoonist to illustrate that vision. Get in contact with the Bootstrap Institute if you want to do such a project.)

Here are my Day 2 notes below for the Accelerating Change Conference 2004. My brain is totally overwhelmed by late morning (and sleep deprivation plays into it) and undoubtedly I probably don't do justice to the quality of the presentations.

Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research told us this weekend at his session on the My Life Bits project that categorizing and tagging all the data in his life would take another lifetime, so that's why he's hired an assistant.

I decided I didn't have another lifetime (or even an assistant) to clean up all the notes from this weekend's intense Accelerating Change Conference 2004. And I'm guessing you'll value immediacy over quality editing.

Realizing most of us can quickly skim even long passages, I decided to share my notes "as is" (I've clearly delinated each new speaker) with you in their entirety. Divided into Day 1 and Day 2 as that is how I took the notes.

This will allow me to also blog on what I thought the highlights and key takeaways were in my view while I still have some energy.

If you find something that strikes your interest as you peruse the notes, then go to IT Conversations to hear the session in its entirety or consider buying a DVD (all the DVDs were available at the show, so it's just a short matter of time for the order form to go online).

And there's never any replacement for being there in person (virtually doesn't cut it), so jot down next year's dates, October 28-30, 2005 at Stanford University (more info) and I'll see you there.

David Brin, author of The Transparent Society, is joking about how a astronomer/physicist transforms to a sci-fi author to being a pundit for openness. His talk is about What Limits Our Ability To Cope WIth Accelerating Change.

There are two ways to look at the future and the past. And in almost every civilization, "the golden age" of the past is often romanticized - everything was great until we fell from a state of grace. Perhaps from hubris and trying to appropriate the gods' power.

The difference between these two worldviews - the past was the golden age or the future is the golden age - is profound and to a large extent mutually incompatible. [Reference made to Election 2004 here.]

Shai Agassi, executive board member at SAP - one of the largest software companies in the world - was the second keynote at Accelerating Change Conference 2004. He's responsible for SAP's overall technology strategy. [Agassi was much more engaging and humorous than my notes indicate.]

I am considered the futurist in our company. Our company is very sales-driven so we're making futurist predictions when they talk about the next quarter - but I myself look out five years.

Nicholas Carr asks in his book, Does I.T. Matter? He equates computer industry to the train industry after all the train tracks have been laid. But the computer industry is different. Most of I.T. investment happened in the last 20 years reduces process execution time. We're at 200 millisecond transactions. So the question is valid: Why would you invest to go from 200 millisecond to 20 millisecond transactions?

The next challenge is "time to change." Product lifecycles haven't moved as fast. And change management - pushing beyond the corporate inertia - events such as a merger takes 18 months in a corporation. A corporate venture can take 18 months to reflect an effect in the business.

[It's time to lower my standards for these posts. I have a backlog of draft posts from yesterday - coming soon. Reminder that these are notes, and any pithy observations, etc. come later.]

First, Mark Finnern, the organizer of Bay Area Future Salon and co-producer of conference, is saying that he has seen the future and it is Second Life. One day Second Life will allow you to 3D print what you created in Second Life; even something as large as a house.

Will Wright, creator of SimCity and Sims, founder of Maxis. Topic: Sculpting Possibility Space is the first keynote.

A lot of people consider games related to story. You can put story on one end and game-play on other end of spectrum. Story games like Myst use a branching structure topology. In a story format, the topology is linear and the game developer creates narrative. In interactive format, the topology is dense and the player creates the narrative. Thus the appeal is empathy in story, and agency in games.

You could look at a game as a possibility space, a landscape. You want to have a wide set of options. Now showing a 3D terrain graph and there are peaks and cliffs and the goal-oriented players want to move "uphill" (success) and overcome challenges. With Sims there are material, social 2D terrain axis and success is height axis.

There is also issue of language - it's a different language than designers are using. If you come across a dog, even in real world you might parse out the following in your mind: Noun- dog - me, Verb - bite - run or (more complex) Purpose - Companionship - Safety. And advectives. Big or small tank.

Most games have primary metaphor or primary verb. And it's KILL.

They've used a shopping catalog to give choices of nouns and verbs in the game. Shopping catalog metaphor provides for description and gives impression of limited resources and trade offs.

Models. Communication is a process of constructing models. Science is a process to build models. Science is moving away from analytic models like calculus and more into simulation. This parallels game play trend. These possibility spaces become scaffolding for the imagination of the player.

Dynamics. I think about the raw material we use to build these virtual worlds... How do these things interact over time (the behaviors)? What are the paradigms (network theory, cellular automata, system dynamics (Jay Forrester), cybernetics, chaos theory, complex adaptive systems, adaptive landscape )?

Interesting thing about games is the nested feedback loops. There are short cycles like 10 sec - each level has success and failure. In SimCity (or Sims?), there is nested success/failure levels progressing from Basic Control -> Needs -> Job/Skills Economy -> Social-Friends -> (missed this last one). The game designers spend a lot of time on the failure scenarios because they found that players spend more time here and that they don't mind failing if they know why they failed and it's fleshed out in details and it's interesting.

The future is usually highly extrapolated. When skyscrapers just came out everyone envisioned Metropolis.

Cybernetics is about feedback structures - and by chaining these together you can have elaborate structures. Cellular automata is the first that allowed for emergence. SimCity is combination of paradigms of system dynamics and cellular automata. CAS have internal rules systems (neural networks, genetic algorithms fall into this area). An offshot of AI. Actually what biologist calls fitness landscape influenced the idea of having 3D terrain maps to represent "possibility space." Especially interested in scale-free social networks. People could define friends and enemies in Sims.

All of these are not reality - they are just trying to explain - they are models. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics - but neither can explain the reality of a duck. Other elements in the game toolkit: Disordered<-> Ordered, Local<-> Global, Cooperate <-> Compete.

Just finished The Sims 2. In 1984, one person created SimCity and in 2004, took 130 people on the Sim2 project. If you extrapolate we'll need 2.5M designers not too far in future. Content teams within the project team are the group growing faster. So how can we get players involved with creating content? Maxis created 500 characters, 800 objects. And the fans created 16,530 characters and 10,600 objects.

In The Sims 2, players can also cast their characters into movies and shows and film them. This is something they call "derivative content."

Metrics. We can formally measure everything you do. We can build profiles on what the player tends to do and compare to other players. We can see what they buy. We can look at relationships they develop. We can even see how they are traversing through the possibility space of the game. We can do things with that data - perhaps introduce them to other players, what content they might want to use or interact with. You see this happening in TiVo (at a much slower feedback loop). The computer can see where player is going in the possibility space and dynamically alter the possibility space (for instance, if you just met a new girl, your ex could show back up in the picture).

Question on comparing to Second Life. Second Life players are more advanced than our audience. Sims audience is 55% female and most of them have never played another computer game. Both are very open-ended. (Also Sims mostly offline game.)

If you have more women on your developer team it's like falling off a log - you don't have to do focus groups on how to reach women's market.

We found for our players biggest barrier to online game is business model - many (and I don't) want to pay $15/month. I like the computer understand what I'm trying to play and it starts evolving around me. It knows I'm doing a scary movie or if it's a sit-com suggests appropriate music. Your version of game and mine end up different after a month.

We see our players as co-developers. We spend a lot of time with the people who run the websites, etc. We ask them at Sim University (a gathering/conference) about what they think of microtransactions. Experimenting with microtransactions for allowing users to sell their content. We don't have digital rights management (yet); so you could change a few pixels.

Question on if you could have avatars move between two worlds - i.e. Sims and Second Life. Not now but it's theoretically/technically possible with Sims 2 characters.

If you take pictures at the Accelerating Change 2004 conference, please load them to Flickr with the tag ac2004.

Without even talking to each other Ross and I used exactly that tag. Unfortunately my camera battery flatlined right after that shot. When was that again that battery life accelerates? Currently it seems I am still on the accelerating draining.